The Nonhumans' Holiday
by joanhello
Summary: With so many humans in costume, Halloween is the perfect time for nonhuman residents of Metrocity to come out and mingle with the populace. And crashing the Scotts' annual costume party is the perfect time for Megamind to get into the mansion for a little covert safe-cracking. For @Alec's-Art on Discord, as part of @generalwoundwort's Secret Santa fic/art exchange.


Halloween was not just Megamind's favorite holiday. It was his absolute favorite day of the year. On Halloween, even during the day, he and Minion could walk the streets like any other citizen, shop in stores, visit the museum, go to movies, even challenge total strangers to compete at games in the arcades. Not one citizen realized that it was really them. Well, except Ms. Ritchie, the one time they ran into her at a display of bags of chocolate eyeballs in a candy store. It was crowded and he'd been pushed up almost face to face with her. She'd done a double take and met his eyes with a look of astonishment. He'd been tongue-tied with embarrassment at being so close to her, so unexpectedly. It was Minion who'd save the situation, fantastic fish that he was. He'd leaned over Megamind's shoulder from behind and spoken very softly to her.

"Please, Ms. Ritchie. This is the one day a year we can be normal." She nodded, cleared her throat, and put on a big fake smile.

"Wow, those are great costumes. I almost though you were the real thing for a second there." While she spoke, she put four bags of the eyeballs in her basket. "Later, guys." She moved away through the crowd. Megamind stared after her.

"Now, that is a classy lady," he murmured. "I wonder what she wanted with so many chocolate eyeballs."

"Maybe she's having a party, Sir."

"Nonsense. She'll be at the Scotts' party, like every year."

"Speaking of that, Sir, we should finish up here and move along if we want to get everything done before you crash it."

The Scotts had been putting on sumptuous Halloween parties since long before they'd adopted the child who would grow up to be Metro Man. Megamind had never attended one, but he'd been a guest at Wayne's sixth birthday party, when his entire class at the Li'l Gifted Shool was invited. He had, as usual, felt uncomfortable in the group activities, so he'd gone off exploring the mansion by himself. The kitchen was busy and noisy, so he'd gone down a staircase into the basement. There he'd spent a couple of happy hours checking out the climate control system, the home theater system, the electrical wiring, and the data lines. He'd also noticed a large circular metal door with a handle on it and a little row of seven tiny white plastic tiles, each with a single-digit number on it and with the vertical edge of a tiny toothed wheel sticking out of a slot next to it. When he'd tried the handle, the door didn't open, but an alarm rang and he heard heavy, fast footsteps coming down the stairs. He'd fled, but the family's security men had soon found him. They'd marched him up the stairs, out of the house, all the way to the little booth next to the front gate. There they'd held him while they called the Warden to send someone to come and get him. He was not allowed to go back to the party.

He'd later come to understand that this was the sort of door that safes had. There were burglars at home who knew that Scott Mansion had a small safe on the second floor for jewelry and petty cash, but none of them knew about this larger one in the basement. Now that he was grown up and an experienced safe cracker, he wanted to visit it again, and this party seemed like just the chance. They'd recently perfected stealth technology for the car, so they were planning on driving in along with the invited guests.

That part of the plan went perfectly. The guards were checking everyone off on a guest list, but they left the gates open between vehicles. Minion drove the invisible car right in. They didn't even notice. He pulled it onto the lawn, positioned it for a quick getaway, and settled down to wait while Megamind slipped out and joined the stream of costumed guests flowing in through the front door.

He wasn't the only Megamind in attendance, although he found his doppelgänger to be rather lame. There were other famous villains, fictional and real, heroes ditto, supernatural beings, various forms of wildlife, and a wide range of other options, from 1920s flappers to a man outfitted as Mount Rushmore, with his own face, painted to match the stone, poking out between Jefferson's and Roosevelt's. Even the staff were costumed, all as henchmen of the villainess Sombralaya, who tried to take over Milwaukee four years ago. Metro Man had flown over there to help defeat her. Megamind had been unimpressed with Sombralaya, but apparently his old rival had liked the style enough to want to use it every year since. It was certainly uncanny enough. Grotesque, even. He had a hard time seeing how normal human bodies could squeeze into those shapes. Each of them had a neck almost half a meter long, connected to a little round torso with short legs in what looked like medieval peasant clothes (the trousers long enough that they hid the feet) and arms also inhumanly long and thin. The arms were bare but the hands were gloved. The skin was very pale and slightly gray. The head was perfectly round, with hair like dry grass, a tiny button nose, little round cheeks, and tall, pointed ears placed a little too high on the head.

Maybe they were androids, or puppets operated from within by very small humans, who would have to be very expert to deploy the hands and feet and faces so realistically. He considered bumping into one hard enough to knock it over, because the way it failed as it fell would reveal what it really was, but he decided against it. It would call unwanted attention to him, and besides, he had no desire to make the staff's job any harder. He and they had a common enemy, after all. If he found one of those androids or puppets unattended while skulking through the back corridors of the mansion, and he wasn't being hotly pursued, he'd stop to examine it, but he wouldn't go out of his way to find one. It was the sort of thing that could be researched later. Right now, he needed to stay focused on the mission.

He moved slowly, as the real guests did, working his way through the room toward the service corridor that led to the basement stairs. He was careful to avoid coming to the attention of Wayne, whose X-ray vision could easily have identified him. The hero was dressed as a bird, as he was every year, with a cape of real feathers that attached to his arms and a hood-cowl-mask combination that covered the upper half of his face, with the beak anchored over his nose. This year he was a royal albatross in reference to the fact that he had flown around the world a few months back, nonstop, not using superspeed, just to see how long it would take him. (The answer turned out to be: 31 hours, 7 minutes. He couldn't quite keep up with the sun.)

Finally he reached the servants' door and slipped out into the bare, undecorated corridor that he remembered. It seemed to be smaller, but he knew that was because he was bigger. A door was open to a side room. In it, Ms. Ritchie, dressed as Robin Hood or Peter Pan or someone like that, was conducting a workshop on chocolate sculpture for a dozen or so children. There was a table with several bowls and platters of materials including the chocolate eyeballs. She glanced up as he passed the door but immediately looked away, giving no sign that she'd seen him. He moved on, down the hallway to the stairs, down the stairs to the basement. The heavy door at the bottom opened into a finished, elegant media room where a man in the uniform of Scott Industries security was playing a video game. He was clearly there to keep people away from the safe, but he didn't expect anyone to try it except noisy drunks. Megamind eased past him as he had eased past the guards at home many times, and slipped through another heavy door, conveniently ajar, into the utility area where his goal was. The ceiling light was already on.

The round door was open.

He approached.

The floor inside looked like slightly uneven rock, like the natural, unimproved floor of a cave. Beyond the few square feet that were illuminated by the light from the room, where he expected to see the shelving typical of a large safe, he mostly saw darkness, with tiny lights, high and distant. Stars, but not in the familiar constellations. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that he was looking, not into the side of the hill on which the mansion was built, but out through a kind of porch; the ceiling and walls extended only a few feet, and beyond them was open sky. This was utterly contrary to the geography of the hill. He should not have been seeing this. And he should not have been smelling what the air coming through the door smelled like: open countryside far from the city, with a hint of wood smoke and zoo.

Either this was an illusion of the sort which he, himself was working to master, or he was looking through a portal to another world.

Suddenly, like the first time he'd stood in this spot, he heard rapid footsteps coming down the stairs. But now he was better at hiding. He had studied ninjutsu. A quick glance upward showed him that the utility area had no ceiling, only the joists holding up the floor above. He stepped toward the door, then leaped up, braced his feet against one joist and his hands against another, and held himself up there by friction. Most humans don't look up unless they're expecting something up there. He was so close to the door that a person stepping through it would be directly under him. He couldn't quite turn his head far enough to see that spot, but he could see whoever it was if they advanced into the room.

The door opened fully. He heard quick steps. One of the grotesques passed under him, dashed through the round doorway, and was gone.

After waiting a moment to be sure that no one else was coming, he let himself fall, pushing off sideways as he let go so that he rotated in the air and landed on his feet.

If what he had seen had been an illusion covering a compartment only a few feet deep, then the grotesque would have run face first into the back wall. Megamind would have heard the collision and would probably have been able to see someone lying there. Instead, he saw just what he'd seen the first time, and heard footsteps in the distance, faint and fading out.

_So Scott Mansion has a portal in it. I wonder how long it's been here._ Megamind had heard of portals like this, but knew that they were very rare and the likelihood that he'd ever get to study one had seemed to approach zero, given his commitment to Metrocity. But now it turned out that there was one conveniently located after all. He had come here hoping for cash, gold and jewels, and perhaps valuable documents, but the round door had turned out to hide something even more precious. Driven by ravening curiosity and with no thought for his own safety, he stepped through.

The surface was, indeed, bare rock, covered with some kind of lichen except for a path leading straight ahead. In a dozen steps, he came over the brow of the hill and saw that the path continued down a grassy slope with occasional bushes, illuminated by a little cluster of lights at the bottom. He guessed that he was seeing a small village or perhaps a single large compound. The temperature was about the same as in Metrocity at this time of year, so he was quite comfortable. He would have liked to study the foliage on either side of him as he walked, but that would require light and he had enough of a sense of self-preservation to want to avoid using the flashlight feature on the de-gun. The stars and the distant lights of the village provided enough light that he could keep himself on the path, although he could probably have managed it by feel. The grass was coarse and ankle-high. He would have noticed immediately if he had stepped on it.

He needed to step on it only once, when he saw the same grotesque he'd followed coming toward him up the path. Fortunately there was a large bush nearby that he could hide behind. The grotesque was running at a surprisingly good clip given the uphill climb, not looking to either side. As they passed, Megamind noticed something, a bag of some kind, on the strangely shaped back that hadn't been there on the outward journey. Which would explain why the person had to make this trip. The bush had spiky leaves something like holly.

Once the grotesque was gone, he resumed his journey. Soon the open grassland gave way to fenced areas (the fences were about waist high on him and seemed to be made of sticks tied in a crosshatch pattern), often terraced to level the slope. The nearest of those terraces turned out to be the roofs of earth-sheltered buildings, their windows facing downhill. Whiffs of zoo came from some of them, signs that they housed livestock. Near the bottom, on a bit of ground raised above what he could see was the true bottom of the hill, there were free-standing buildings, mostly cylinders of either circular or ovoid floor plan, although the largest one appeared to be hexagonal, with rough horizontal dark and light stripes. All the roofs were conical. Beyond, the land was flat and divided (by hedgerows of bushes and trees) into the polygonal fields typical of cropland, with a large body of water in the distance. A path, wider than the one he was on, ran along the bottom of the hill.

Above the roofs, he could see an odd statue. It was of Metro Man, from the waist up, about life size, but Janus-faced, so that both sides showed the front of him. Megamind was looking at it in profile, so it looked like the fronts of two statues stuck back to back. Someone approaching on the wider path from either direction would see his face, chest, and beefy arms. Below the statue's waist, there was something that made a dark horizontal line and then the top half of a similar Janus-faced portrait of Sombralaya. The roof of the hexagonal building blocked his view of anything below that, but he could read the symbolism. _This village is under the protection of Metro Man, defeater of Sombralaya. Don't mess with us_.

In the center of the village, there was activity. More of the grotesques were setting out tables and hanging up decorations. There were grotesque children, none of them very big, helping or trying to. He realized that they were not in costume but were actual nonhumans. This was their natural appearance.

Why did this not occur to him before? They (the ones serving at the party) were doing exactly what he was doing: taking advantage of the holiday to mingle with humans. Apparently, when they had been Sombralaya's henchmen, she had put a stop to any hope for them of returning to wherever they called home. It was not an uncommon practice among the type of villains Megamind didn't respect at all. After her defeat, Metro Man couldn't simply abandon them, so he had brought them here, to his family's secret world. Heroes don't have henchmen, so he employed them once a year as servants, not that he needed them. The Scotts could easily afford to hire humans. Perhaps this was part of the deal: they needed his protection but they wouldn't accept it for free. They felt the need to do something in return, so he convinced his parents to have them serve at the Halloween party. He chuckled at the mental picture of Metro Man introducing them to his mother.

Still, he couldn't think of them as grotesques anymore, now that he knew. He decided to call them the people of this village until he learned a proper name for them.

Some of the decorations were typical harvest festival stuff, bundles of grain and such. Some were Halloween stuff, jack-o-lanterns and bats. A banner was being strung with, oh god, Metro Man's logo on it. Then several of them carried in a heavy wooden armchair, too large for any of them, and set it under under the banner. Then a table was set in front of the chair and Megamind understood that Wayne himself was expected here for dinner.

Here was an opportunity to make his rival look like a fool in front of the whole village! Halloween was a night for tricks as well as treats, and what an excellent trick this would be! The first thing to do would be to undermine the legs of the chair so it would collapse under him when he sat in it. Then, if he could hide something behind the banner, tied to the chair by a thread, that would open up and cover him with water or glitter or paint when he fell, that would make it even better. As he came up to the first buildings, he stepped off the path and began to skulk from shadow to shadow, looking for an unattended woodworking shop where he could steal the tools he needed.

Sneaking around unseen turned out to be more difficult than expected. The streets and paths were busy. Hidden in one shadow, he had to wait a long time for the moment when no one was looking, when he could slip to the next shadow. It tried his patience, and patience was not his strong suit. He also had to look in a lot of windows before he saw what he was looking for: a room with tools and a workbench in a house with no lights on. (There was something not quite real about the place. All the structures, plastered smooth on the outside and with thatched roofs, seemed to be new. There wasn't any weathering at all. He made a mental note of it, but it didn't dampen the excitement that kept him forging ahead with his plan.) He was careful enough about getting to the (unlocked) front door of the cylindrical hut, slipping inside, and picking out tools and a bag for them without unnecessary light or sound, but then, excited to be finally ready to initiate the next phase, he tiptoed right back to the door and, without checking for observers on the street, flung it open.

There were five of them, two adults and three children. They stared at him for a moment, just as humans did when they came upon him unexpectedly. Then one of them said "Megamind!" in a nasal tenor and they all ran, shouting something incomprehensible to him except that his name seemed to be in every sentence.

He fled the house with his booty. With the de-gun on his hip and his personal force field still active via the spikes on his mantle, he knew he was in no danger from them, but as long as they knew where he was, he had no chance of implementing his plan. Perhaps, if they got the notion to form up a mob and hunt him down, leaving the village center temporarily deserted, this would work to his advantage, giving him a chance to circle back and sabotage the chair. So he turned away from the center, charging up the path to a street, then up the street, dehydrating everyone he saw except for a few whom he allowed to flee. He figured the more uproar he caused, the better.

He was just getting to the outskirts, looking around for a way to circle back, when suddenly his personal force field shorted out and he was lifted by his collar in an all-too-familiar way. He expected a few words of banter from his rival, or moral condemnation, but what he heard was "Time out." He nodded.

They flew uphill, not quite along the path he'd come down. He could see it, and its end at the shallow alcove in the cliff where the portal was, off to his left. They finally landed on a high ledge in the cliffside, around the bulk of the mountain just enough that the village was no longer visible. It was the closest equivalent available to the rooftops where their "time out" conversations usually took place. Wayne was still wearing his albatross costume.

"This is a nice place," he said. "I'd be really upset if something happened to it."

"You are asking for the price of my silence regarding it and its inhabitants."

"Yeah."

Megamind looked out at the starlit landscape. A little of the village's farmland could be seen, but mostly it was forest all the way to the horizon. No lights. He was a city villain. While he understood the value of rural areas, he personally had little direct use for them. So why not agree to keep silent about it? Only the fact that Wayne would expect to pay some kind of price, and his own enduring curiosity, stopped him from simply agreeing.

"The truth," he replied.

"About what?"

"This place. These people. How it came to be in your basement, and how they came to be serving at your family's party."

"My great-great-uncle Andrew," whom they both knew was the inventor and industrialist who had established the Scott fortune, "got into some really crazy stuff in his old age. When he had the house built, pretty much the whole basement was his lab. He had some alien tech that he didn't understand, so he was trying every test he could think of on it. One day it blew up. When the smoke cleared, it was gone and there was this portal."

"And the house was still standing. He was very lucky."

"Well, it wasn't his first explosion. He knew how to build things to contain the blast."

"Still, I know just enough about portal creation to know that he was very lucky. So what did he do, now that he had a portal?"

"Not much. He borrowed one of my great-grandmother Wilhelmina's dogs and played fetch with it, throwing a stick through the portal so the dog would run through to fetch it. When the dog was fine, he put it on a leash and took it for a walk. By the time he got back, she had found out that he'd risked her dog's life and she was out for blood. It was her idea to put the safe door on. She was always worried that there was something dangerous out there, and we never knew for sure there wasn't until I did my survey, summer between fifth and sixth grade. This place doesn't have much in the way of animal life at all. Insects, frogs, lizards. The only place I found anything bigger was in the oceans."

"So there might be mineral wealth, if one wanted to go to the trouble of prospecting and mining, but its only immediate use is as a place to hide."

"That's about the size of it. I did some of my training here, where there was nobody around to get hurt if I misjudged something."

"You mean, you started doing it here after a certain incident." Megamind had spent five weeks of his sixteenth year in the prison infirmary as a result of that incident.

"Yeah."

"So when you found yourself with this crowd of former henchmen of a previously unknown humanoid species, you brought them here. Do you happen to know where Sombralaya got them, by the way?"

"From what they told me, she used another portal, came into their world and kidnapped about fifty of them. She did some kind of biology thing to them, I don't know the details, but it made them need to inhale something that humans exhale."

"Oh, I see. She intended to use them as the officer corps of her slave army, the slaves who kept the human slaves in line. And that's why you have them serving at your family's party: so they get a good dose of human exhalations once a year."

There was a moment of hesitation before the hero said, "That's right."

"Now, Wayne, you promised me the truth."

The hero flinched under his avian cowl. "Okay. When all the festivities and the clean-up are over, some time before dawn, we close up the door and some kind of time parallax thing happens. When we open it again next year, only two days will have gone by on this side."

"Ah. That explains how everything in the village looks newly built even though it's been four years. If I didn't already have dehydration, it could be an excellent way for certain of my criminal colleagues to wait out statutes of limitation."

"Please don't. Even after the Iblzioreg move out, if they're ever able to move out, I don't want anybody trying to exploit this place. And you know, once they've been here, they're going to try to exploit it." Megamind made a mental note of the name.

"Oh, I won't. It's much more to my advantage to have a method that I control directly. But on the subject of the Iblzioreg's eventual fate, are they unable to return to their origin because Sombralaya committed suicide by blowing up that other portal? That's the sort of thing these slave-army types usually do when they're on the verge of defeat."

"No, we got her, but she killed herself in jail, and she was the only one who knew where the other portal was or even if it still existed. So there was no taking them home. They couldn't stay on Earth. You know how humans are."

"All too well."

"So I brought them here and gave them what they needed to start living here. What Sombralaya did to them wasn't hereditary. Their children don't have the need. So when the first generation dies out, they won't need humans anymore. Maybe by then we'll have found that other portal. In the meantime, I would really prefer not to have anybody mess with them."

"Oh, of course not. I would never want them hurt now that I know about them, although I doubt they'd believe it. They all seemed to fear my name."

"I figured you'd find this place sooner or later, little buddy, so I warned them. Sometimes I brought some equipment through and showed them one of Roxie's reports of a battle."

"Does she know?"

"Heh. Try to keep anything secret from Roxy."

"Was she the one who ratted me out?"

"About you being down here? No, it was Xyg'Vhootl."

"The Iblzioreg individual I followed in here, who ran down to the village and ran back?"

"Yeah, him. I'm surprised you let him see you. You're usually better than this."

"Flattery will get you nowhere."

"So what were you trying to do here? I see you helped yourself to some of the tools I gave them."

"Well, I... the truth is, everyone at home who knows about the safe door thinks there's an actual safe behind it. I had no reason to think differently, so I came here to crack it and see what I could steal. When I saw what was really here, I had to improvise. Didn't want to waste the trip."

"So you stole carpentry tools. You were going to do, what, booby trap my chair?"

"Not booby trap, exactly. Just undermine it a little. A harmless trick for the holiday."

"Except for harm to my dignity." Metro Man's good mood seemed to be back. "So are we square? You're willing to keep your mouth shut about this place?"

"At some point in the distant future, after I retire from my villainous career, assuming that I live that long, I would really, really like an opportunity to study this portal."

"Okay, under these conditions. One, I have to still be alive and living here. Two, we'll have to arrange a date far enough in advance so I can evacuate the building. Three, before you come, you read Great-Great-Uncle Andrew's lab notes so you know the precautions he took. And four, whatever you learn, no humans get to find out about it."

"Agreed. May I at least tell Minion?"

"You know how bad Minion is at keeping secrets. If you've got to tell someone, tell Roxy."

"Oh, yes. She's wonderful like that. Really knows how to protect her sources."

"Um hmm."

"So what now? Are you going to turn me in or just let me go?"

"I'm not taking you back to jail, but I really think you should stick around long enough to apologize to Xyz'ainkfeul. She's the carpenter. And to the people you dehydrated. And then stay for the post-party dinner. These people put on a pretty good feed."

"Er, I'm not sure they'll be positively inclined enough to listen to my apology."

"Don't worry. I'll be right there. And Roxy's coming. You can geek out with her about this."

He knew it would worry Minion if he was gone so long, but the chance to spend time with Roxanne outside of a kidnapping was what persuaded him.

"Very well. Keep me close enough so no one dares to try anything and I'll stay as long as you like."


End file.
